In recent years, systems which carryout information processing have become more complicated and larger in scale due to information processing apparatuses of a variety of different types (hereinafter, simply called “apparatuses”) being connected via a network. In accordance with this, it has come about that a fault which occurs in a certain apparatus in a system has effects on various other apparatuses via the network. A production system is one method of root cause analysis for identifying the location and cause of a fault of this kind that has occurred.
A production system is a system whereby an inference engine, which is a processor that carries out cause analysis inference processing, deduces a solution by evaluation based on applying a predetermined rule of an if-then format to given factual data. An event representing fault details which is reported by an apparatus when a fault has occurred is taken as the factual data, and root cause analysis is performed by creating rules from the correlations between such events. One root cause analysis technology is event collection technology which analyzes faults and causes by using events representing fault details reported from an apparatus as described in Patent Literature 1.